A Publisher?s Rant ? Why I Hate Your Article Headlines

Posted by Nick Niesen on October 27th, 2010

I?m a publisher for numerous sites. I HATE many of your articles. Here?s why I hate your headline and what you can do about it.

The Headline

There is a school of thought out there that your headline should be designed to captivate readers. In the real world, this is probably true. When I am looking for articles, it is not.

I want keywords front and center in an article headline. This may come as a shock, but I am using your articles as part of a search engine optimization effort on sites. With seo, the keywords always come first. ALWAYS!

Consider the following examples:

1. California Real Estate ? The Secret to Making a Bundle

2. The Secret to Making a Bundle in California Real Estate

The first headline is by far the best. The keywords are front and center. I can easily turn this headline into a meta title for site page. More importantly, this tells me that you may be a writer that understands what I want. I am going to click through to your article and read it. If the rest of the article is done in the correct format, I am going to publish this article on my site AND I am going to add you name to my worthy authors list. When I need new articles, I will go out of my way to see if you have published anything new.

The second headline is a disaster. The keywords are at the end of the headline, which is terrible for search engine optimization purposes. This is a waste of my time and tells me to avoid your articles. If I can?t find enough articles with the proper headline, I may come back and read yours. Then again, I may not.

Captivating Headlines

Now you may be thinking you need a captivating headline because you want to capture as many readers as possible. You DO NOT. I?ve already done the job for you. My sites already have traffic. I am delivering the readers to your article. They will read it if it is on the site. Of course, you?ll have to put the keywords first to get my attention.

Writing a headline is a fairly simple process. So do it!